Time & Perspective Quote by Otis Rush

There is a quiet origin myth hiding in the casualness of "messing around". Otis Rush frames his beginning not as destiny but as boredom, play, and private pleasure. Then the sentence turns on a single hinge: his sister "took me around". That detail matters. Blues history often gets told like lone-genius folklore; Rush slips in the social infrastructure - family, community, someone older opening a door and saying, come see this.

The names he drops are a map of mid-century Chicago as much as a playlist: Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter. He isn't describing influences in the abstract; he's naming living proof that the music could be a job, a scene, a way of moving through the city. "The first time I saw that onstage" marks the conversion point from sound to spectacle. Records can teach you licks; performance teaches you what a life might look like.

"I thought that was the world" lands with the force of a kid staring at a lit stage and mistaking it for the whole planet. It's wonder, but it's also claustrophobic in a telling way: the blues as total environment, a complete system of style, status, and survival. Rush captures how a cultural universe recruits its members - not through lectures or theory, but through proximity, electricity, and the shock of seeing your future embodied right in front of you.